Hard labour for Preston women who picked pocket of school master

At the Preston Quarter Sessions of early January 1896 Ellen Simpson and Catherine Stones, two women in their mid-twenties and described as loose characters, appeared charged with stealing a purse and £5 from the person of Edward Henry a Preston school master.

Barrister Mr Charles McKeand was the defence counsel for the accused women and he heard Henry outlining his version of events.

The school master stating that he and a colleague had been walking up Church Street four nights before Christmas, after having a beer and a couple of small glasses of whisky, when the women approached them with a seasonal greeting. The school master stopped to talk to them and whilst doing so the prisoners stole his purse out of his trouser pocket.

The women then left and after walking a few yards ran off.

The theft had been witnessed by three little girls standing close by, and when they told him what they had seen he and his colleague went after the women. Eventually capturing them and handing them over to P.C. Morrow, who later found the purse discarded in Main Sprit Weind where Henry had overtaken the women.

Mr. McKeand in cross examining Henry suggested that he stopped to speak to the women, who were clearly drunk, for an immoral purpose and that it was not the behaviour expected of a man who taught children.

Henry was furious at the suggestions of Mr. McKeand and called him a liar and stated that he had engaged in conversation with the women purely in a friendly manner.

Only the intervention of the deputy chairman Mr. B. R. Walmsley restored order as he told Henry to simply answer the questions put to him, and not call into question the barrister’s character.

Mr. McKeand commenting that throughout a number of years in the courts of justice he had never been called a liar, and in his closing speech to the jury he said that the schoolmaster had shown himself unworthy of credence.

The deputy chairman began his remarks to the jury by saying that there had been some corroboration of the prosecutors tale - not least by the evidence of the little girls who had witnessed the theft.

Commenting further that the attempts to call into question the character of the prosecutor had been justified as Mr. McKeand had every right to question the character or motives of any witness.

The jury took little time in recording a guilty verdict, and the two women who had several previous convictions were sentenced to 12 months imprisonment with hard labour.